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Friday, February 17, 2012

More GOP Follies On Judicial Nominees

There are 84 vacancies on the federal courts -- almost double the
rate of vacancies by this point in George W. Bush's first term. To understand why we need look no further than the "long and obstruction filled road" of the newest judge, Adalberto Jose Jordán, who eventually was confirmed by a vote of 94-5 for a seat on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Jordán was hardly controversial. He was rated unanimously well qualified by the American Bar
Association and cleared the Judiciary Committee with unanimous support. Nevertheless, his nomination was pending on the Senate floor since before the December recess,
and the Senate opted not to schedule a vote on his nomination. It was then that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed a motion to force a vote on his nomination, and an overwhelming majority of senators voted in favor of the motion.

As Nicole Flatow at American Constitution Society explains, here's what happened next:

Sen. Rand Paul, seeking to gain leverage for an unrelated proposal
to cut off aid to Egypt until detainees are released, exploited a
procedural rule and refused to consent to a vote before the permitted 30
hours for “debate” had lapsed.

While the Senate waited for the 30 hours to elapse, several other pieces of legislation were held up.

“Paul wants to send a message to his colleagues about Egypt and
American foreign policy -- and he's doing it by adding one wrong on top
of another,” wrote Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic.

Congressional staffers I checked with
couldn’t recall a similar instance of blocking a confirmation even after
a filibuster had failed. This would seem to be a unique humiliation for
a man hailed by the Hispanic National Bar Association because of “the positive message this nomination sends to the Latino community.

Two days later, the Senate confirmed Jordán just as overwhelmingly as
they had voted to end the filibuster of his nomination, by a vote of
94-5.

This week, the Senate confirmed Judge
Adalberto Jose Jordan to a seat on the federal Court of Appeals for the
11th Circuit in Atlanta. A visitor from another country might not have
appreciated the proportions of this achievement, given the fact that
Jordan, who was born in Cuba and who once clerked for Sandra Day
O’Connor, had no discernible opposition.

But Americans ought to have a better grasp
of how the Senate works. The nomination’s progress had long been
thwarted by Mike Lee, a freshman Republican from Utah, who has decided
to hold up every single White House appointment to anything out of pique
over ... well, it doesn’t really matter. When you’re a senator, you get
to do that kind of thing.

This forced the majority leader, Harry
Reid, to get 60 votes to move Judge Jordan forward, which is never all
that easy. Then there was further delay thanks to Rand Paul, a freshman
from Kentucky, who stopped action for as long as possible because he was
disturbed about foreign aid to Egypt.

All that is forgotten now. The nomination
was approved, 94 to 5, only 125 days after it was unanimously O.K.’d by
the Judiciary Committee. Whiners in the White House pointed out that
when George W. Bush was president, circuit court nominations got to a
floor vote in an average of 28 days.

No matter. Good work, Senate! Only 17 more long-pending judicial nominations to go!

This was the eighth time Reid was forced to take the extreme measure of filing a motion for cloture to force a vote on one of President Obama's judicial nominees. He has just done it again, to force a vote on federal prosecutor Jesse Furman, another consensus nominee who was approved by the Judiciary Committee for a seat on the Southern District of New York without opposition.

Like the needless delay in Judge Jordan’s confirmation, the Republican
filibuster of Jesse Furman, who by any traditional measure is a
consensus nominee, is another example of the tactics that have all but
paralyzed the Senate confirmation process and are damaging our Federal
courts. It should not take five months and require a cloture motion for
the Senate to proceed to vote on this nomination. At a time when
nearly one out of every 10 judgeships is vacant and we have over 20
judicial nominations reported favorably by the Committee, 16 of which
have been stalled on the Senate calendar since last year, nearly all of
them superbly-qualified consensus nominees, our Federal courts and the
American people cannot afford more of these partisan tactics.